Hunter had never known anyone who could suck out information like Jase. He could walk through a half-empty parking lot and come up with three new friends and enough street information to fill a telephone book.
“There’s an ICE Special Detachment agent back there,” Jase said. “He’s out of Brownsville. They’ve been on both houses for a while. They think the mopes we bagged are LDX.”
“Los de Equis?”
“He called them Los de Xibalba.”
“
Xibalba
. That’s the Mayan word for the underworld. For hell.”
“Figures.”
“Are these guys involved in the artifact trade?” Hunter asked.
“No such luck. They’ve taken a lot of ancient Maya imagery for their tats and jewelry, but all ICE knows for sure is that they’re narco terrorists of the worst kind. LDX is used as an elite enforcement arm by the Q Roo cartel. Killers every one.”
“So they’re like the Zetas? Only they haven’t branched out into their own business yet?” Hunter asked.
“Yes and no.” Jase found an opening in city traffic and shouldered into the flow. “The Zetas started out as a Mexican military unit that was meant to take apart the cartels. Then some Zetas cut loose and went to work for the narcos.”
“So they started as hired guns and finished as head of their own cartel,” Hunter said. “Can’t trust an assassin long enough to blink.”
“But LDX doesn’t seem to have profits as their driving force,” Jase said. “ICE is going nuts trying to get inside their organization. No go.”
“Is Snake LDX?” Hunter asked.
“The special agent didn’t think so. It seems that genuine LDX don’t mark themselves up for the world to see.”
“Gang culture’s all about bragging, flashing the signs, wearing the colors.”
“LDX isn’t a gang like we know it,” Jase said. “The special agent didn’t want to come right out and say it, but LDX is more a cult than anything else.”
Hunter was silent while Jase pushed the minivan like it was a sports car, darting in and out of traffic lanes.
“It fits,” Hunter finally said.
“What?”
“One of my best sources in the Yucatan told me that LDX works with the Q Roo drug cartel, but it’s only to get paid for what LDX would do for free. The Q Roo boasts of having the baddest badasses of them all. LDX makes good on the boast.”
“Beautiful,” Jase said sarcastically. “ICE special investigations first got wind of these guys through some makeshift shrines and the like showing up in prisons. Weird stuff. Crucifixes with snakes wrapped around them and stone faces with rosaries. Monsters made out of scrap stolen from the shops or trash or whatever. Doesn’t matter that Corrections took them down as fast as they found them. It spread. Maybe it started in jail, maybe it got imported.”
“Better and better. A death cult. Serial killers serving a ravenous god.”
“That’s what the special agent thinks,” Jase said unhappily.
A horn blared at someone who had double-parked in front of a coffeehouse. Jase swerved around the vehicle without lifting his foot from the accelerator.
“I’ve seen those cult trappings in the Yucatan,” Hunter said, ignoring the near miss. “Places where real blood is believed to have real power, not just the Santa Muerte drug shrine garbage. This is old, old belief coming back in a new form. The Spanish couldn’t kill it, and they had the Church and the guns on their side. Hard to shut down an idea. Especially if it’s an idea that makes you feel stronger, better.”
“Stronger or crazier?” Jase asked.
“Whichever gets the job done.” Hunter’s hand fisted on the dash. “Damn, I don’t want Lina anywhere near this, yet those artifacts…Damn!”
“I don’t blame you. The body count at the place we just left was four, and they haven’t even begun to dig.”
“But the altar hadn’t been there long enough for the blood running down those table legs to reach the floor.”
“Maybe they wore the old one out.” Jase shrugged. “Kill in the name of cartel profits. Kill in the name of an unknown god. Same result. Dead.”
Hunter clenched his teeth and wished that Lina’s job was curating
Teddy Bears Through the Ages.
But it wasn’t. No matter how much he hated it, Lina was on the trail of death.
“I don’t like any of this,” Hunter said. “You want to just bag it and come to work for my uncle?”
“What?”
“Just what I said. There’s always a job waiting for you. You know that.”
“Not until ICE throws me out,” Jase said stubbornly.
Silently Hunter hoped that wouldn’t be too late.
L
INA SAT IN HER OFFICE, LOOKING OUT AT THE HAZY AFTERNOON
. She felt like she was sixteen again, waiting for the phone, willing it to ring.
Unlike when she had been sixteen, it actually rang. She grabbed it.
“Hello,” she said.
“It’s Philip,” her father’s voice said. “What do you want?”
“Are you still in Belize?” she asked, ignoring his curt greeting. Nothing personal, just the way he was.
“No. I’m at the estate, getting ready to work a new site. What’s this nonsense about another scandal?”
Briskly Lina put herself in the proper frame of mind to deal with her father. He was a man of extremely limited interests and less ability to deal with people, especially his family. He simply didn’t know how to express affection.
“There are rumors of a group of artifacts reaching the marketplace,” Lina said carefully. It was hard to keep Hunter’s secret and still get information. “Has Celia mentioned them to you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. She hides artifacts from me.”
“The descriptions I received point to artifacts that could relate to the cult of Kawa’il. Have you heard anything?”
“Damn de la Poole!”
Lina added the missing parts of the conversation and winced. “The artifacts weren’t connected with Mercurio.”
“Then they don’t concern me.”
“What about looters on Reyes Balam lands?” she asked, as blunt as her father.
“They wouldn’t dare. Carlos and I feed all the villages on our land and they protect my sites.”
“Then you haven’t heard any rumors of sensational artifacts appearing on the market?”
“No. Is that all?”
“Yes.”
The connection ended.
Lina wasn’t surprised. Philip was infamous for his curt conversations. Once she had dreamed of being important to her father, if only through her own ability to interpret texts he simply lacked the gut-sensitivity to understand. Then she’d grown up and accepted her parents for what they were—brilliant in their work, indifferent as parents.
A knock on her locked office door and Hunter’s voice saying “You in there, Lina?” made her heart kick. The man who had blackmailed her had shown her more respect than her parents ever had.
More approval, too.
“Yes,” she said. “Let me get the lock.”
“Jase Beaumont is with me.”
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Beaumont,” Lina said as she unlocked the door.
“Same goes, Dr. Taylor.” Jase shook her hand and gave her an easy smile.
Hunter locked the door behind him. His glance went over Lina like a man who had been cold and finally was standing close to a fire.
She felt stroked.
Feeling a blush darken her cheeks, she looked away from Hunter to Jase. He was shorter than Hunter, with dark chocolate eyes and bittersweet-chocolate hair. His skin was the kind of brown than went deeper than a tan. A gold wedding band gleamed on his left hand. Both men were freshly showered, their clothes clean, and their eyes weary. She took a folding chair from behind the door and placed it next to the visitor’s chair across from her desk.
“Sit down,” she said. “I’ve got half a pot of coffee if you’re interested.”
“Thanks,” Jase said.
“Black,” Hunter said. “I’ll get it.”
Lina waved him off and started pouring coffee into mugs that held the museum logo. “If you want something to eat, the cafeteria is still open.”
Jase and Hunter exchanged a look. After what they had seen, they didn’t feel particularly hungry. Or clean, despite showers hot enough to burn.
“We’re good,” Hunter said to Lina. All he really wanted from her was a kiss to drive out the basement’s deadly cold. He wished he had the right to simply go to her, hold her, feel her living warmth. “Do you have a sketch pad and a pencil?”
She smiled. “That’s like asking if I’ve worked on digs.”
She opened a desk drawer and pulled out a sketchbook, plus three grades of pencils, and handed them to Hunter.
He caught her hand and the pencils, holding her, breathing her in, eyes half closed. Her swiftly inhaled breath told him she liked it. Slowly he took the pad and pencils, drinking her warmth through his fingertips.
Jase gave Hunter a sideways look that told him he could feel the heat.
“Thanks,” Hunter said to her, his voice deep. Forcing himself to focus on something other than his blunt hunger for Lina, he opened the pad and flipped past sketches of glyphs and artifacts—some of which he recognized—until he found an empty page. As he began to sketch, he asked, “Have you made any progress on your end of the artifact chase?”
“No.” She leaned against her desk for the simple reason that her knees wanted to shake. The hunger she’d felt radiating from him was more complex than plain old sex. “When I mention new artifacts, everyone wants to buy them but nobody has them. My father, who has been on a dig in Belize, hasn’t heard anything. Mercurio de la Poole, who is the only other recognized expert on the cult of Kawa’il, was coy. He wouldn’t say anything unless I was there in person.”
“Do you think he has them?” Jase asked instantly.
“I don’t know,” Lina said. “Mercurio has no particular motivation. His museum is run by the state of Quintana Roo with money from the Mexican federal government and artifacts from Reyes Balam land channeled through state and federal governments. He has his own digs in Belize, where he has found some indications of the cult of Kawa’il. Since the government funds him, if he had your missing artifacts he would study them, publish, and take his bows.”
“How well do you know him?” Jase asked.
“Quite well. He and my father worked together for years. I spent summers, vacations, and every moment I could beg from Celia on the digs where Philip and Mercurio were.”
“How did de la Poole and your father get along?” Jase asked.
“Nobody ‘gets along’ with Philip,” Lina said. “You just go along and understand that he won’t ever change. All you can do is control your own response to him.”
Hunter heard what she didn’t say, the child hoping and trying and always failing to find approval.
My uncles would love her to death,
he thought. So would his mother, if she hadn’t been killed by a hit-and-run driver in a crosswalk ten years ago. His father had been with her. He had lived a day in ICU. Then he died of his injuries.
“So you don’t think de la Poole stole the artifacts from your father,” Jase said, “for revenge, professional jealousy, plain old spite?”
“If Mercurio had done that, Philip would have tracked him down, cornered him, and taken the artifacts back.”
“But you don’t think that’s likely,” Jase said.
“Nope.”
“Describe Philip in three words,” Hunter said without looking up from the sketch pad. He didn’t trust himself to. He wanted to hold Lina so much he ached.
“Curt, obsessive, brilliant,” Lina said.
“Mercurio?” Hunter asked, needing to know, yet his voice was neutral.
“Charming, ambitious, very smart.”
Hunter relaxed. There was nothing particularly affectionate in her voice.
“That’s why I don’t think he has the artifacts,” Lina added. “He can’t publish them, can’t display them, can’t sell them. They’re of no use to his ambitions and he’s smart enough to know it.”
“Your mother?” Hunter asked, still not looking up.
“Gorgeous, shrewd, formidable businesswoman.”
Hunter sketched, listening to what was said and what wasn’t. Her words told him that her childhood hadn’t exactly overflowed with love and approval. He heard respect, understanding, and little else. He wanted to ask whether she enjoyed or avoided her mother and father, but Lina’s emotions had no bearing on finding the artifacts, so he kept quiet and let Jase work.
“How about your mother’s competition in the artifact sales game?” Jase asked.
“They’re all variations on Celia’s theme. Few have her connections when it comes to accessing legitimate Yucatec artifacts from the end of the Maya rule and the continuation of Maya life under the Spanish rule, so Celia’s pretty much at the top of her heap.”
“Where does she get her artifacts?”
“Reyes Balam lands. Family lands.”
“So your father’s digs are on private land.”
“With the full blessing of the Mexican state and federal governments,” Lina said.
“Did your family buy the land because of the ancient ruins?” Jase asked.
“No. The family lands are from the time before the Spanish came.”
“How’d you keep them?” Jase asked curiously. “Damn few natives did.”
“The Balam family was among the first Maya nobility to accept the Spanish rule and sign formal treaties with the Spanish king,” Lina said. “In return, the Balams were granted a good chunk of the Yucatan and a Spanish noble title. Thus the Reyes Balam line began.”
“Your ancestors were Maya royalty,” Jase said. “Wow. Should I bow?”
“Only if my mother was here. And she would tell you about the minor Spanish royalty who married into the Balam family to exploit New World wealth.” Lina’s voice was wry. “As for me, I really don’t care. I’m American.”
“Huh. I’m a mix of Spanish,
indio,
Irish, and Japanese,” Jase said. “But I sure ain’t no royal.”
“Neither am I,” Lina said.
“Japanese?” Hunter said. “I never knew that.”
“My grandfather was half Japanese. By the time it got to me, it didn’t show.”
“It does in your sister,” Hunter said, remembering. “Beautiful almond-shaped eyes.”
“But they’re blue,” said Jase.